“Name the science fiction novels that have influenced you the most.”
When I am asked this question, which is fairly often, I count them off on my fingers:
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein
City by Clifford D. Simak
To that list I would also add The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt and The Astronauts by Stanisław Lem.
All of these were books I read in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I was reared a product of imperial wartime Japan and educated by a militarist regime. Still, I eagerly adapted to the changes in public thought after the war and believed I understood my world. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the intense culture shock I experienced from these works of science fiction. I could feel the scales fall from my eyes.
From Childhood’s End I learned about the heart of Western culture. From The Martian Chronicles I learned about the art of the novel. From City I learned about the beauty of decay.
For me, the concept of the “Absolute” was the key to the world of SF. I found it tremendously enjoyable to ponder what the Absolute, or an Absolute Being, meant in the West, in the East, to the world, and to the universe.
Around the same time, I discovered the beauty of the Big Bang theory.
Time, formerly a simple absolute that stretched from the infinite past to the infinite future in an endless stream, was understood now as something relative: a limited change that stretched only from point in time A to point in time B. If the borders of time’s existence are the borders of our universe, what then was the universe before time began and after it ended? If we try to explain this by saying nothing exists outside our universe (not even nothingness!), we fall into the darkness of epistemological nihilism.
So what do we do? We could stop thinking about it altogether at that point, or we could try to find some answers to these primal questions, which is where SF comes in.
In retrospect, the mid-1950s found me planted in some very fertile SF mind-soil. The news and the excitement were fresh, and there was limitless material for writing.
Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights sprang from the elation and confusion inside me. It is, to me, my most important work, while also being a work I never want to touch again. I can barely stand even to look at it.
(Oddly enough, I fear my own internal SF mindset has grown even bleaker since those days. No laughing matter, to be sure.)
With this edition of Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights, I took the liberty of adding several new lines in places that had always bothered me . . . because I could.
✦ ✦ ✦
Ryu Mitsuse
April 1973